Monday, October 3, 2011

Today, I'm going to pretend this is a cooking blog like all of the cooking blogs I am constantly pinning on Pinterest.

I am not a master chef. I am merely a nineteen-year-old college student who desperately wishes she were a master chef, but whose ingredient price range is more likely to facilitate "101 Things to Make with Ramen" than blanquette de veau. However, not to toot my own horn, but the dinner I made tonight was pretty much delicious.

And so I'm going to pretend that every meal I make is a culinary masterpiece, not just once or twice every couple weeks, and that this is a culinary blog, and basically just try to be pretentious for the next few paragraphs.

Red Pepper-Sauteed Chicken and Vegetables with Brown Rice

This isn't the dish from which I ate for dinner; rather, I ate my dinner, decided it was delicious, arranged it artfully on a plate, had my roommate take a picture, and then put the plate's contents in a tupperware for dinner tomorrow

Serves 2, give or take. This picture shows half of what I made, and that seems a little excessive for one person.

I'm not going to lie, I don't know the exact amounts of ingredients. I shall instead write basically what I did.

I used a cup of instant brown rice, and prepared it according to the directions on the box. However, to the boiling water I added a tablespoon full of pesto and a heaping tablespoonful of this stuff:

This stuff is made out of magic and my saint of a mother sent me some in her last care package.

While the rice was cooking, I minced two cloves of garlic and sauteed them in olive oil.

When they were close to getting tender, I added about a third of a red onion, chopped into 1 square inch pieces, and a tablespoon each of pesto and red pepper spread.

When the onions were tender, I added a little over a cup of sliced mushrooms and, once they were browned, added one poached chicken breast, thinly sliced (To poach chicken breasts: cook 3 chicken breasts in a 9x13 pan in chicken broth--I usually use a ramen flavoring packet--at 375 for an hour, or until cooked thoroughly) and tossed the slices with the vegetables until they were warmed and coated with the red pepper sauce mixture, about two minutes.

Finally, I added a handful of baby spinach and continued to sautee the mixture until the spinach leaves were just tender, still maintaining their bright green color.

I then arranged the rice and chicken/vegetables on the plates and garnished with sea salt, freshly ground black pepper, and a couple dashes of balsamic vinegar.

[Side note on sea salt and freshly ground black pepper: they seriously make anything seem delicious. "Tonight, for dinner, I will be having ramen... with sea salt and freshly ground black pepper." Ooh, fancy.]

This post was terrible. That's why this is not, in fact, a cooking blog.